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Now that I am unplugged from my devices and to-do lists, I get to find out what my mind is really like. And who I really am.
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I tend to feel very mortal when I’m on retreat. Without to-do lists, email, blog posts, relationships, calendars, there’s just my basic human mortality – the pulsing, vibrating, sensing of pleasure and pain in the body, and my mental habits. There is nothing else external to distract you from the simple truth of body sensations of pleasure, pain, and neutrality coming and going, mental states of grasping and aversion coming and going. It’s all very elemental. You see yourself as being a natural process which is limited in duration. The preciousness of life becomes abundantly apparent.
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When I sit with all my mortalness in meditation, I am apt to reflect on the things I am doing in my life and whether they are an adequate expression of that precious mortality. Am I living the right life? I don’t tend to ask this questions when I am caught up in the everyday details of my life. But on retreat, with nothing around to mirror my assumptions about what is important and worthy of my attention, I am forced to become intimate with my elemental aliveness – to be intimate with the simple fact of being human. And when I can do that, the great questions start to resonate.

This is the time of the year when everything seems to get intensified. Our work schedules are usually extra busy with end of year or seasonal deadlines. Add to that all the events and pressures of the holiday season, whether it’s your office party or planning for the holiday dinner you committed to make or sending out cards or shopping for gifts. There’s a certain joyous frenzy to it all. It can be a fun time of year. But it’s just as likely to be a very stressful time of year when we find ourselves going through the motions of the season without any presence of mind, in a kind of dissociative trance. We become so wrapped up in doing things that we forget our being completely. We become completely unbalanced.

Paradoxically, this is a great time of year to just let yourself be. Taking some time each day to sit and breathe is critically important especially during high stress periods like the holidays. Even ten minutes a day of breathing can make a huge difference. Who has time for that? you might ask. How sad that we so often neglect to connect to ourselves. What does all the giving of the holiday season mean if you’re not able to give yourself the gift of your own attention? You’re not being selfish. You’re honoring your own mental and physical health by taking time out to breathe. To become still, silent, and simple. In that silence and stillness we can reflect on what’s important to us, about the kind of year we’ve had, about our successes and failures and our aspirations for next year. Even during a busy day you can remember to practice STOP whenever you feel you need it — just noticing your breath, your body sensations, and acknowledging whatever thoughts or emotions happen to be present, without needing to change how things are but simply opening to how things are.

So please, give yourself the greatest gift in the world this holiday season – the power of your own attention and self-care.

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Mindfulness is a very forgiving practice. Whether we lose track of our thoughts during a meditation or forget to notice our body and breathing during our work day or completely fall out of the habit of practicing mindfulness altogether – in any moment, at any time, we can simply begin again. This is especially relevant […]

Acknowledging how things are is a key to reducing stress. When we experience difficulties in our lives, so often our default mode is to say NO, NO, NO! to them. We decide that our difficulties shouldn’t be happening, look for someone to blame (often ourselves or people we dislike), and find any way we can […]

I am in my apartment, cleaning up. I’m feeling rushed, so I lift my tea pot, my lacquered Japanese cup, and my water bottle from a table and begin taking them over to the kitchen sink for washing. Because I’m carrying three things I needed to thread the pinky of my right hand through the […]

I’m in the dentist’s chair for my semi-annual cleaning. The sound of the dental hygienist’s tool is loud as she moves it into my mouth to start in on my teeth. As the shrieking object is applied to my teeth, a sensation similar to hearing fingernails scratching a blackboard occurs. Then the hygienist moves her […]

We tell ourselves stories all the time about the way life is treating us or about the ways we plan on conquering life. Because we’ve been retelling versions of these stories for years, they are extremely compelling. We tend to believe our stories because they have become so familiar. Haven’t you noticed that? There is […]

If you were to do a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats analysis of your meditation practice, under “weaknesses” and “threats” you might include five basic challenges that every meditator has to deal with. In fact, failure to deal successfully with these five challenges often leads people to abandon their meditation practice entirely, never to meditate […]

Perhaps the most fundamental fact of our aliveness is that from the moment of our birth to the moment of our death, we are breathing. Yet strangely enough, we routinely take the breath for granted and forget about it. Our attention instead is gripped by our to-do lists, our racing thoughts of gain and loss, […]

Since the presidential election, it seems as though the very idea of truth is under assault. In an ever more volatile and uncertain world, many people choose to live in media bubbles that reflect their biases and the mental habits that keep them in their comfort zones. Resisting complexity, many curate their realities by focusing […]

There are literally thousands of ways of meditating. There are many traditions and many paths. But perhaps the most fashionable form of meditation these days is the practice of mindfulness and the industry of mindfulness spawned by it. This is a trend that began more than a decade ago and is still very much current. […]

Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is probably the best known mainstream mindfulness program out there. It was created in 1979 by the pioneering work of Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn at the UMASS Medical Center. The MBSR curriculum has been extensively investigated and is the subject of many research studies verifying the great benefits that mindfulness practice has […]